Friday, April 14, 2006

You (loyal readers of my blog -- all both of you!) can relax now -- I'm ok! Shout out to Cheryl and Sarah for giving me some IC history to help write this!

As you might have hearda few tornadoes tore through Iowa City last night. There was peach-sized hail (GYNORMOUS and SCARY) coming down and lightning and thunder everywhere. Then we were hearing on the radio that a few tornadoes were sighted in the vicinity and moving east toward IC. The tornado siren was going for like 4 hours straight last night.

University of Iowa got hit pretty bad -- downtown sustained a ton of damage and it's absolutely insane over there. There's huge piles of debris everywhere. They cancelled classes today for the first time in 15 years. (The last time, incidentally, was in 1991 when a physics student went on a rampage and shot 5 people. Science!)

A lot of the traffic lights got ripped out, and I saw several buildings lost their roofs, walls, and windows. The National Guard was sent in to help clean up and control traffic. A lot of students were walking around asking if they could help but I heard on the radio that tangled up with the downed tree branches are power cords which might be live, so it's best to just stay out of the way right now. We've seen a lot of natural disasters over the past year or so but it's really unnerving to find it--literally--so close to home.

Thankfully the worst damage in my neighborhood was just some tree branches got thrown around, some of the cars outside got a little beaten up, and I saw a couple of bent over street signs and one uprooted stop sign. There was so much destruction just up Highway 1 which is like 2 seconds away. A co-worker who lives about a half-mile over apparently had an uprooted tree driven straight into her house.